maybe-and somewhere a woman was waiting to be butchered.
He couldn't stand it.
STANDING IN THE YARD, he talked to Sloan again-Sloan had gone downtown so he'd have access to a police computer-and to Elle, and even to Weather, whom he reached before she went to bed.
'You say Sloan is going psycho… you sound like you're going psycho,' she said. 'I don't think it's healthy for both of you to be crazy at the same time.'
'Sloan says he's gonna quit. He sounds serious.' Silence, two seconds, five seconds. 'You still there?'
'I was wondering what took him so long,' Weather said.
'Ah, Jesus, I'm trying to talk him out of it.'
'Don't do that. Let him get out.'
'Gotta find this goddamn woman,' Lucas said.
'Yes. Do it.'
HE WENT DOWN to the Northfield police station, a red-brick riverside building shared by the cops and the fire department. Three cops were sitting in a conference room, two city guys and a sheriff's deputy, Styrofoam cups scattered around, the smell of coffee and old pastry; a police radio burped in the background, a harsh underline to the hunt. The main dispatch center for the region was in Owatonna, well to the south, and the cops inside the station were just waiting for any call that needed a quick reaction. Not what you'd expect, Lucas thought, for a major search operation-but the fact that there was nobody in the office meant that everybody was on the road.
Stopping white cars. Stopping light-colored SUVs.
Stopping cars with single men in them. Stopping cars that looked funny; acted funny; might be out of place.
Glassing hillsides in the woods, as though they were hunting for deer, or elk.
Fighting the sundown.
AFTER DARK, the action slowed. Reports came in from the Boundary Waters. Nothing there.
Lots of cars stopped.
Lucas watched, waited, and talked. At eleven o'clock, tense but bored, tired of jumping every time one of the radios burped, he borrowed a yellow legal pad and began to copy the names of rock songs onto a piece of paper. One hundred and twenty songs, when he finished. He looked at the list, crossed off two songs, added one that Carol had suggested that morning -Robert Palmer's 'Bad Case of Loving You,' which Lucas thought was on pretty shaky grounds to make the top 100, if not in outright quicksand. Still, a good tune…
He stood up and said, 'Jesus Christ, where is she?'
A half an hour later, he'd rolled and rerolled the paper with the rock list until it looked like a cheap yellow cigar. He finally stuffed it in his pants pocket and was about to go out for a Coke when a Goodhue County deputy was routed through to the dispatcher in Owatonna, and then back out to the countryside. He was breathing hard: 'Guy… white truck I think, SUV turned off when he saw my lights, running fast, dumped his lights, I think he cut across a field because I lost him, I don't know which way he's heading now, but he was heading west when I first saw him, I'm gonna go another mile or two south, see what I can see, cut my lights and creep back up the road, I think maybe he's just pulled off, you got somebody west of here on Nineteen?'
'Yeah, we got a couple guys, I'll get them headed that way.'
'Tell them to shut down the flashers, he saw mine and dodged… I'm not seeing anything…'
'Jesus Christ,' Lucas said, as the dispatcher talked to cops farther out. 'Where is this, where is this…?'
One of the cops poked a map; his finger touched a spot where Good-hue, Rice, and Dakota counties came together.
Then another guy came up and shouted, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, guy ran by me moving fast… high lights. He was doing eighty-eight, I think it's the SUV I'm turning. I'm on Nineteen, Jenny, get me some help up here…'
'C'mon,' Lucas shouted at the radio.
The deputy shouted, 'Ah, shit, he's gone, he's killed his lights, I don't know, shit, don't know whether he went north, south, or straight ahead. Goddamn… I'm going north on Boyd, that was the first turn, but he maybe ditched somewhere, do we have anybody west on Nineteen? Or south, we need somebody south… Man, he was moving. Andy, if you're still around Waterford, get over to Nineteen and head east. He may be coming at you, I don't know what color the car was, his high lights were on, but I think it was an SUV… I clocked him at eighty-eight… He could be going south, do we have anybody south…?'
Lucas listened for another few seconds, then asked, 'Where is that?'
One of the cops jabbed a finger at a wall map. 'Tommy was coming west on Highway Nineteen when he saw the guy, and the guy disappeared here. Tommy went north, Andy is coming in this way…'
Lucas looked at it, said, 'Maybe he should have gone south here instead of north…' He was second-guessing the guy on the scene, and he had absolutely nothing to base it on, except his own case of nerves.
'Flip of the coin,' the cop said. 'It's all cut up over there, hills and farm plains. We-'
He shut up for a moment as the dispatcher said, 'Manny, are you up?'
'Yeah, I'm moving, but I'm way over northwest of town.' Lucas looked at the map for another minute, then, said, 'I'm going out there. South. I can be there in five minutes.'
'Big chunk of territory.'
'I'm doing nothing here,' he said. 'And there's nobody out there right now.'
HE FELT BETTER as soon as he got in the truck. He put the light on the roof and ripped south out of town, working with the navigation system on his truck. If the guy had been going west on 19 and turned south, and was trying to dodge cops by taking a twisty route out of trouble… Lucas manipulated the scale of the map up and down, running out to One Hundredth Street at high speed. There were few cars around-more pickups than anything-and few of them were moving fast, as far as Lucas could tell without radar. He punched the number of the Northfield center into his cell phone: 'This is Davenport- any action?'
'Tommy's coming south again. Andy hasn't hit anything on Nineteen, he's going to turn south on Kellogg, but the guy's gotta be way south of that, if he went south. Most likely, he's ditched in some woods off Nineteen.'
'I'm running with a single flasher on One Hundredth Street, I haven't seen anything yet.'
'Have you crossed Kane?'
'About a minute ago.'
'Then you're coming up on Goodhue. It's gravel down there, I'd suggest you head south, then come back west on One Hundred Tenth. There are a bunch of little streets south of there on Kane.'
Lucas traced the suggested route on his nav system, thought it sounded reasonable. He cut south on Goodhue, spraying gravel.
The night was hazy, the lights of the surrounding small towns show-ing up as ghosts on the sky. He took Goodhue across some railroad tracks to One Hundred Tenth, cut west, hesitated at the next crossroad, and turned south again. He zigged back and forth, following the dusty gravel roads, narrow, no shoulders, houses flicking by in the night; some of the houses were old farmsteads, some looked like they'd been airlifted out of a St. Paul suburb. Most showed a yard light; and though the night was deadly dark, it was pierced all around by yard lights, mercury-vapor blue and sodium-vapor orange, and far away, the red-blinking lights of radio towers.
Hard- surface road now.
He flicked through the tiny town of Dennison, decided he was getting too far east-the vehicle they were hunting had been heading west-did a quick U-turn and whipped through Dennison again, past the Lutheran church, down a hill, a bank, a Conoco station, a car dealer, all with small lights alone in the night, empty…
His nav system said he was on Dennison Boulevard and then Rice County 31, as though it couldn't make up its mind. The town lights were fading in his rearview mirror when he saw a car's taillights flare ahead of him.
No headlights; just the taillights. He felt a pulse: somebody running?
'Get the motherfucker,' he muttered to himself.
